By: Elizabeth V.Koshy

An excavator pounds the rock,
earth moving machines claw out
boulders to make boulder-hills,
from the first light to evening twilight.

Working to the dictates of the concrete mixer
yellow-helmeted automatons, apparitions in grey,
collect the spewed out concrete in wheelbarrows
and empty it into troughs.

Others scoop it out with buckets,
hand it to still others on ladders,
to be poured into moulds for pillars.
Seventeen buckets to the minute!

Smoothen out slabs in sweeping arcs and fill beam moulds
late into the night, to build sky-scrapers, podiums
and play areas for the rich, after getting burnt all day
under the blistering and broiling sun.

Return to temporary shacks made of corrugated tin sheets,
with plastic sheets on top of the tin roofs
weighed down by wooden sticks and bricks,
to dream of building for themselves what they’d built for others!

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Dr. Elizabeth V.Koshy is a Professor in English Literature at Dr A. B. Telang Senior College, Pune, India. Her poems have been published in edited anthologies by Sweetycat Press in ‘Love’, ‘Song’, ‘Beauty’ and ‘Movement’, Clarendon House Press (in Poetica 3,4,5,6), Gertrude’s Writing Room, Caesurae.org, The Writers Club (Grey Thoughts), Stacy Savage’s Poetry for a Cause, Lothlorein Poetry Journal, The World of Myth Magazine, Indian Periodical and Spillwords.com. Her CNF/memoirs have been published by the Academy of the Heart and Mind, Impspired.com, Impspired Magazine and Sweetycat Press. Her poem ‘The mystical conjunction’ was selected by Sweetycat Press for ‘The Jewels in the Queen’s Crown’ anthology in the 24 K Gold category.